Dynamic network slice resources reconfiguration in heterogeneous mobility environments

Flávio Meneses,Augusto Neto,Daniel Corujo,Rui L Aguiar,Rui Silva

doi:10.1002/itl2.107

Abstract

This paper proposes a framework that optimizes network slicing provisioning in over‐the‐top (OTT) scenarios, by reducing occupied resources of slices from where the User Equipment (UE) handovers from. To achieve this, the framework leverages an existing Software Defined Networking (SDN)‐based UE virtualization scheme, which allows to instantiate in the cloud a representation of the physical device and its current connectivity context. This scheme was extended with the ability to anchor the UE's datapath and mask the underlying slices in a single end‐to‐end slice, allowing handover mechanisms between slices to become transparent to involved endpoints. This framework was implemented and evaluated in an experimental testbed where the UE moves between Wi‐Fi and long‐term evolution (LTE) slices, with results showing that upstream and downstream throughput is dynamically adapted to the UE requirements prior to the handover.

Highlights

The user traffic patterns have been changing along with the network evolution
The OTT represents a third-party providing a service that ensures the optimal connection and QoE for its user equipments (UE), by negotiating with the mobile network operators (MNOs) and OTT to ensure the UE’s communication requirements and the optimal network slice resource allocation. Nowadays this role is deployed in entities existing at the MNO, but, in our paper, we exploit the flexible capabilities of Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) allowing such new players to appear in the market in the future
This paper proposed an architecture aiming a cooperation among different providers (i.e., OTT, MNO and Internet service providers (ISP)) in order to optimise wireless slice resources

Summary

Introduction

The user traffic patterns have been changing along with the network evolution. As the network evolves to better support traffic demands and new services emerge, users have been exploiting the increasing capabilities of wireless user equipments (UE) resulting in highly dynamically communications (i.e., ranging from a voice call to a ultra-high definition video). SDN northbound (NB) interfaces, such as the Representational State Transfer (REST), allows the development of SDN applications to assist the SDN controller in the management of the network In this context, the proposed elasticity of slicing and the flexibility provided by SDN and NFV technologies, pushes the necessity of developing mechanisms to manage the UE’s connectivity while transparently optimise their network resource usage, in order to provide the best user experience (UE) without over-allocating unnecessary resources. Despite efforts from MNOs to offload data to non-3GPP networks, mechanisms fully supporting seamless handover over heterogeneous networks are still not widespread, specially when considering the elasticity proposed by network slicing In this line, the virtualisation of the UE’s wireless context in the cloud (i.e., vUE), while using OF for flow-based handover have been previously proposed [7, 8].

Architecture Overview Solution

Proof-of-Concept Implementation and Evaluation

Findings

Conclusions and Future work